Congratulations on your recent decision to join the National Speleological Society. The NSS provides numerous opportunities for members to further explore their interests.Becoming involved with your local NSS group(called grottos) allows you to interact with people in your area that have a wide array of knowledge, experience and interests. You can find a grotto close to you by going to www.caves.org/io/grottos.shtml. Once a year, the National Speleological Society holds a national convention in locations throughout the country. The national convention allows you to meet cavers from all over the country and all over the world. The national convention provides the opportunity to explore and develop new interests as well as to share information about current interests.You can go to www.nss2006.org to find out about where Convention will be this year. But if you can't make it, you can go to www.caves.org/info/events.shtml where you will see that there are many other events around the country.

You may be asking, "What kinds of interest can I explore through the NSS?" The NSS has many groups, referred to as "Sections", that focus on various areas related to caving and the study of karst. Click here to go to a list of these groups with links to get more information about them. Additionally, we are developing a collection of articles(see left-hand menu) at this website that provides information for newer members.

Another source of information/communication is the NSS Discussion Board. The discussion board currently has over 1,000 members and contains almost 15,000 posts. It would be rather surprising that anyone intertested in caves and karst could not find an interesting discussion going on here. Click here to join the Discussion Board today.